No Feed, No Problem – Google Reader Now Tracks (Mostly) Any Website Change
Jan 25, 2010 at 5:38pm ET by Barry Schwartz
The Google Reader blog announced you can now track changes to any web page, even the ones without RSS feeds.
How does this come in handy? Well, let’s say you want to track when Google changes their webmaster guidelines. All you do is copy the URL into Google Reader and click on “create a feed.” Google Reader will then periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.
Here is a picture:
After you click “create a feed” Google will label the item as “a Google-created feed.”
This can come in handy for SEOs, webmasters, searchers, researchers, news writers, savvy shoppers and many more.
Technically, this cannot track every web page out there. You can opt out your pages from this by blocking Googlebot from indexing it via your robots.txt file or by using the noarchive tag, as specified here <meta name=”googlebot” content=”noarchive”>.
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Hi – Femtoo – (http://femtoo.com) has been able to do this for some months now. But Femtoo also has these key features:
- Monitor particular parts of a page
- Parse data and check for particular conditions (share price hit a certain amount etc)
- Premium accounts can create ‘low latency’ trackers for critical monitoring applications
- Receive notifications via email, Instant Messenger and soon SMS (I think)
- Add a ‘widget’ to any page to allow people to ’subscribe’ to a ‘tracker’
- It uses the amazing cQuery (http://cquery.com) Server-side CSS Content Selection Engine
- You can publish ‘trackers’ to the ‘Tracker Library’ and anybody can subscribe